No shellfire or bullets, but war still intrudes on tiny Syrian island

A picture of Syria's President Bashar Al-Assad hangs on a wall at the museum of Arwad, on the island of Arwad, Syria August 3, 2019. REUTERS/Yamam Al Shaar

ARWAD, Syria (Reuters) - In the years before Syria's war the boatmakers of Arwad used to sell their wooden vessels along the Mediterranean coast down to Lebanon and up to Turkey, but the trade has withered.

The tiny island is one of the few places in Syria physically untouched by eight years of conflict, its only direct brush with war being the distant boom and sight of smoke from an explosion on the mainland in 2016.